"You find yourself in the center of this political theater, in this chess match that's being played out by very powerful figures—you feel anger, befuddlement, disillusionment, disgust.
" The intimidating effect is undeniable, he says. Some of his colleagues were so demoralized by the accusations and investigations that they withdrew from public life. One came close to suicide. Mann decided to fight back, devoting more of his time to press interviews and public speaking, and discovered that contact with other concerned people always cheered him up. Meanwhile, his sense of personal alarm has only grown. As Mann sees it, scientists like Schmidt who choose to focus on the middle of the curve aren't really being scientific. And yet, like Schmidt, Mann tries very hard to look on the bright side.

Surprise! Looks like 2016 is going to be the hottest year in history.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has announced that 2016 will be the warmest year in recorded history — by a lot.

The Arctic had an especially warm year, and experienced the sharpest rise in temperatures, while Africa and Asia also felt unusually high temps. Globally, surface temperatures climbed to an average 58.6 degrees F, 2.3 degrees F higher than before the Industrial Revolution, when humans got serious about burning fossil fuels. The warming temps continue a well-established trend: Last year was also the hottest year on record at the time, and 2014 was the hottest year on record before that. In fact, 10 of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1998.
World heat shatters records in 2016 in new sign of global warming. Non, le réchauffement climatique ne s’est pas arrêté en 1998. For the last time, warming is not slowing down!
That’s according to a new study in Science Advances, the latest installment in a debate that has refused to die.

The controversy started in 2013 with a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggesting that global warming had stalled. Researchers scrambled to explain what looked like a “warming hiatus,” while skeptics seized on those weird numbers to attack climate science. The confusion should have been cleared up in 2015, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that a shift from ship-based measurements to ocean buoys could explain the low values. There was no “hiatus” at all. Republican Rep. This latest study “shows that NOAA got it right,” says Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist at UC Berkeley. Researchers had long measured ocean temperatures from the warm bellies of ships, Hausfather says.
Your kids may be getting a confusing education on climate change. This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Kids are a vital part of the climate change conversation; they’re the ones, after all, who have to live in the world the rest of us are screwing up. But if they go to a public school, they could be getting a very confusing education on the subject. On Thursday, researchers published the first peer-reviewed national survey of science teachers on whether and how they teach about climate change, in the journal Science. The survey, which covered a representative sample of 1,500 middle and high school science teachers from all 50 states, found that classrooms often suffer from a problem also common in the media: the false “balance” of giving equal weight to mainstream climate science and climate change denial.
Capitalocène plus qu'anthropocène.

If the EPA relaxes deadlines for CO2 cuts, will the U.S. still be able to keep its climate promises?
Education increases belief in climate change — everywhere except in the U.S.
In China, people are more likely to understand the risks of climate change if they live in the city instead of the countryside.

Le grand bétonnage, une bombe climatique. We broke a whole lotta climate records in 2014. As has been seen year after year, the warming of the Earth is causing major changes in many aspects of the planet’s climate, and 2014 was yet another year that showed this trend in stark relief, a report released Thursday says.

Numerous records were broken last year, according to the State of the Climate report, an annual checkup of the global climate published in a special issue of the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Now in its 25th year, the report pulls together hundreds of scientists from dozens of countries to piece together the changes from the previous year in all aspects of the Earth’s climate — from carbon dioxide levels to the planet’s rising temperature, from glacier melt to change in soil moisture — and puts them in the context of decades-long trends.
Supreme Court Rejects Obama's Drive To Cut Mercury Emissions From Power Plants. WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against an Environmental Protection Agency regulation limiting mercury and other toxic emissions from power plants, undermining the Obama administration's drive to cut pollution from electricity generators.

The case looked at the EPA's regulation of mercury and other emissions from power plants under the Clean Air Act, which Republicans have attacked as a "war on coal" and an example of presidential overreach. The EPA interpreted the law "unreasonably" when it failed to consider the costs of compliance with the new regulations, the court ruled 5-4 in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia. "EPA strayed well beyond the bounds of reasonable interpretation in concluding that cost is not a factor relevant to the appropriateness of regulating power plants," concluded the majority. "Over more than a decade, EPA took costs into account at multiple stages and through multiple means as it set emissions limits for power plants," wrote Kagan.

Climat: la perspective d'un vrai accord mondial s'éloigne un peu plus. Négociations : sauver le climat... ou les profits ?
This is crazy, but we actually have good news about climate change. This story is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Known to scientists as “tipping events,” they could contribute to mass extinction of species, dramatic sea level rise, extensive droughts and the transformation of forests into vast grasslands – among other upheavals our stressed world can ill afford. Here are the top six climate events scientists worry about today. 1. The Arctic sea ice melts.

85% des Français ignorent la cause réelle de l’effet de serre, selon un baromètre ADEME. Beneath the tar sands is even dirtier oil, and industry is salivating over it. The price of crude oil has slumped to its lowest point in six years, and that has sent some major oil companies scrambling to get out of expensive tar-sands projects in Alberta, Canada. Shell has pulled out of one of its largest lease applications, and Petrochina is attempting to get rid of its tar-sands assets. Environmentalists have watched the slowdown with great hope.
Le dieu pétrole dévore le Canada, par Nancy Huston. Britain’s most powerful politicians agree fighting climate change is a jolly good idea. There’s good climate news from the United Kingdom.

On Saturday, the leaders of the country’s three major parties — Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Labor — all signed a joint pledge to aggressively fight climate change and phase out the use of coal. This isn’t because politics is any less divisive or partisan in the U.K. than in the U.S. Rather, it reflects key differences between our political cultures.

Changement climatique : des solutions existent pour 9 Français sur 10. India may be the next big polluter to announce a climate plan. India is poised to unveil a new climate plan as soon as January, an Indian business publication is reporting. That’s yet another bit of good news that makes a 2015 global climate agreement look just a little more likely. Up until now, India, the third-largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, has been resistant to calls for limiting emissions. But when the U.S. and China, the two largest climate polluters, announced an agreement to curb their emissions last month, the world’s eyes turned toward the third country in line. India’s announcement could come this January, when President Obama visits the country at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

If you think climate politics in the U.S. are crazy, wait till you see what just happened in Australia. Hold on to your hats! Australia’s already-bizarre carbon price adventures veered into the utterly surreal overnight. Picture this: An eccentric billionaire mining baron, most famous outside Australia for commissioning a replica of the Titanic, appearing alongside the world’s most recognizable climate campaigner and former U.S. vice president, Al Gore, to announce Australia’s relatively new carbon tax will be scrapped, and a new emissions trading scheme proposed, effectively screwing over the sitting conservative prime minister, Tony Abbott, who is hell-bent on getting rid of carbon legislation altogether.

It’s a big blow to a prime minister who said recently in Canada that he has “always been against” an emissions trading scheme, and believes fighting climate change will “clobber the economy.” For watchers of Aussie politics, it was a visual feast of weirdness.
Foundations Band Together to Get Rid of Fossil-Fuel Investments. Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York TimesEllen Dorsey of the Wallace Global Fund, which is coordinating foundations’ efforts to sell off coal, oil and gas production stocks. Updated, 3:08 p.m. | Seventeen foundations controlling nearly $1.8 billion in investments have united to commit to pulling their money out of companies that do business in fossil fuels, the group announced on Thursday. The move is a victory for a developing divestiture campaign that has found success largely among small colleges and environmentally conscious cities, but has not yet won over the wealthiest institutions like Harvard, Brown and Swarthmore.

But the participation of the foundations, including the Russell Family Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America and the John Merck Fund, is the largest commitment to the effort, and stems in part from a push among philanthropies to bring their investing in line with their missions. Executives said they had become convinced that the move made economic sense.
Oil (drilling) and climate action don’t mix. The environmental community and the White House have beef, and it just escalated. On Thursday, a coalition of 18 environmental advocacy organizations — including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the League of Conservative Voters — sent President Obama a letter expressing their opposition to his “all of the above” energy policy, which embraces oil and gas in addition to cleaner energy sources.

Although they were careful to note that they “applaud the actions you have taken to reduce economy-wide carbon pollution,” they conclude that “continued reliance on an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy would be fundamentally at odds with your goal of cutting carbon pollution.”
Climat: des mesures encore insuffisantes. 2013 climate year in review: 'the heat is on. Now we must act'